Within the prior art, a problem arises with respect to mobile devices such as laptop computers, mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, MP3 audio/data units, etc. The problem is that the amount of data that can now be stored on these devices can easily exceed 50 GB. Users are increasingly storing large amounts of confidential and sensitive data on such devices. In an event of theft or loss, this data can be used to detriment of companies and government agencies, as well as the problem of misuse of personal data. There have been many examples of such loss. One example was the loss of a laptop computer which had the salaries, pension plan totals and social security numbers of all of the employees of a major corporation in the United States.
One prior art solution for resolving this problem is to force a user to enter a password or PIN every time they want to use the device. Not only is this inconvenient for the user, but short passwords and PINs can be determined utilizing automated systems that try all possibilities. In addition, passwords or PINs that have a large number of characters are extremely inconvenient for users to utilize.
A similar prior art solution is to encrypt the confidential data on the mobile device. This suffers from the problem as it requires an encryption key to be entered every time the device is used. The main disadvantage of encryption is that the difficulty it; breaking the encryption method is determined by the size of the key that is used to do the encryption. The smaller the key the easier the breaking of the encryption method is.
Another method for securing mobile devices is to use biometric techniques. One such biometric technique is to require the fingerprint of the user. The problem with biometric techniques is the cost of providing such techniques on a mobile device.
Another prior art solution is to delete all data on the mobile device once it is detected as being stolen. There are various techniques for determining if a mobile device has been stolen, one is to require that the mobile device automatically report to a central server periodically or when it accesses the Internet or a cellular network. The central server then can delete all of the data on the mobile device.